Doukhobor Autobiography as Witness Narrative

Abstract

For many writers who belong to minority groups, autobiography has come to operate as a where issues about ethnic identity, group memory, and minority subjectivity can be addressed. Anne E. Goldman's call in Take My Word a wider autobiographical field that can a wider spec trum of the ways and means by which people in the twentieth century speak themselves into existence (ix) recognizes how this mixing of autobiograph ical forms has resulted in a new position for autobiographical writing as a way in which minority identities can be negotiated. To help describe how the appropriation of autobiography within minority discourses can result in a different form of autobiographical representation, I want to present a new term called and I want to place it in relation to autobi ography theory. Then I will use a text by Gregorii Soukerov as a witness narrative, and I will connect that to what I call the dias poric imaginary, which I read as a set of tropes developed by Doukhobors so that they can construct their own history and their own way of relating knowledge about that history. The situation of the Doukhobors is ideal for a consideration of alternate autobiographical forms as technologies of identity construction because subjectivity is collective, is deliberately oppositional to main stream discourse, and is formed with reference to a type of embodied mysti cism rather than to psychologized notions of the unconscious and the con scious mind found in Western discourses of the self. The Doukhobors are a Russian-speaking religious sectarian group which has existed in Russia since the seventeenth century.1 The name Doukhobor means Spirit Wrestler. It was originally given to this group by the Russian Orthodox Church, who saw them as wrestling against the spirit of God—that is, against the church as an institution. The Doukhobors adapted the name to mean that they